As CEO of Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., Steve Demetriou heads one of the nation’s largest public companies. Yet he and this globetrotting giant aren’t widely recognized names — not even on their home turf of Dallas-Fort Worth.
The company bears no resemblance to the one-engineer operation started 74 years ago by Joe Jacobs in his Pasadena, Calif., garage.
“We’ve made significant progress, but it’s amazing that for all that we do, we’re still not well known — yet,” Jacobs’ 63-year-old CEO said in a recent interview at its global headquarters in Harwood Center downtown. “We’re so much more than engineering.”
The company is in the midst of a complicated international process of changing its legal name to Jacobs Solutions Inc. For the time being, it refers to itself as simply Jacobs.
Next month, Demetriou enters his seventh year at the company helm, and he’s intent on making Jacobs a high-profile brand.
Perhaps you heard about Jacobs when it announced an $8 million gift to expand Klyde Warren Park’s deck that will be called The Jacobs Lawn. Maybe you’ve seen its signs on projects around town.
But chances are you don’t know that Jacobs is a Fortune 250 conglomerate that generates nearly $15 billion in annual gross revenue and employs 55,000 people worldwide, including about 800 in D-FW.
And you’re probably clueless, as I was, about the scope of work that it does.
Think climate change, sustainability, nuclear power, potable water, advanced building design, environmental cleanup, life sciences, aerospace and cybersecurity.
Jacobs is NASA’s largest service provider, with 6,000 employees doing such duties as engineering the next rocket headed to the moon and manning mission control systems in the launch room at Kennedy Space Center.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, which went into space last July, will hunt for signs of past microbial life and collect rock and soil samples using a calibration device designed by Jacobs and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Jacobs and Jacobs Mace JV are project management consultants for Expo 2020 Dubai, the first World Expo held in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia region. The largest event ever to be staged in the Arab world will include more than 190 country pavilions featuring interactive exhibits, entertainment and meeting spaces.
After the six-month event, scheduled to run Oct. 1 to March 31, 2022, more than 80% of the infrastructure and built environment will be repurposed for a future human-centric smart city, District 2020.
‘Three-digit’ agencies
Jacobs elevated its presence in intelligence, surveillance, counterterrorism and cybersecurity when it acquired KeyW in Hanover, Md. It now works with 12 of the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies.
“We’re huge in the intelligence community, working for all of the three-digit government agencies,” Demetriou said, referring to the likes of the FBI, NSA, DOE and DHS. “We have thousands of people who I can’t even sit in a room with and talk about what they’re doing, simply because of my limited security clearance and the nature of their highly classified work.”
Demetriou would never want to relive last year, but the pandemic turned out to be an opportunity for Jacobs’ culture to shine.
“Look, we had 55,000 people around the world who were fearful of their health and fearful of losing their jobs,” Demetriou said.
He and his top executives held virtual weekly town hall meetings — each one held twice to link in all of its time zones.
“The whole point was to get everyone to stay focused and realize we could be a solution to this crisis,” he said. “And guess what? We set record financial growth and record share price growth.”
In record time, Jacobs helped retrofit four of the top six drug manufacturing plants into vaccine facilities, he said. The company was part of an international team that converted shipping containers into plug-in, intensive ICU pods.
“Logistically, we got hired by the U.K. government to manage its vaccine rollout,” he said.
By all accounts, Demetriou has great latitude in calling the shots. And he’s called a lot of them in the past six years, beginning with his decision to move Jacobs’ headquarters to Dallas in 2016.
He has jettisoned less-profitable businesses and those that don’t fit Jacobs’ digital age strategy while buying and building those that do.
Shortly after joining Jacobs, Demetriou hired consultants who identified where Jacobs was making money and where it was spinning its wheels. “We found out that about 20% of what we were doing was a waste of time,” he said. That included generic construction projects with slim margins.
In less than a year, Demetriou orchestrated two $3.3 billion deals that effectively swapped out Jacobs’ energy, chemicals and resources business — 30% of its revenue — for a major foothold in the environmental and infrastructure fields.
“Most companies don’t like to sell a third of their business,” Demetriou said. “For us, it wasn’t about building scale. It was about building value.”
Lately, Jacobs has been on a roll.
In May, Jacobs and a small business partner, North Wind Portage Inc. in Idaho Falls, Idaho, were awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $6.4 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy to clean up nuclear fallout from the government’s Manhattan (atom bomb) Project and Cold War legacy at the Idaho National Laboratory.
In July, Jacobs announced contracts for three industrial developments in South India that will change the way India builds smart industrial cities; architectural services to redevelop a major hospital complex in New South Wales; and a project that will upgrade a vital water treatment plant in Hobart, Australia.
Who is this guy?
Demetriou grew up the only son — sandwiched between two sisters — in a lower-middle-class, traditional Greek family in Winthrop, Mass., a small town near Logan International Airport in Boston.
His father, a naturalized citizen from Cyprus, opened a Greek restaurant after serving in the U.S. Army. His mother is a first-generation, New York born-and-bred Greek American who performed at Carnegie Hall when she was 17.
“She had a potential career ahead of her as an opera singer,” Demetriou said. “The story goes that she gave it all up to marry my dad and raise a family.”
His father will turn 92 this year. His mother is 86. They live in Naples, Fla.
His leadership style was framed by his father, who ran the family restaurant with inspirational flair. “Working in a restaurant is a people business,” Demetriou said. “The culture of the workforce, the culture of the clients. I got to see a lot of things in the restaurant that have helped me forever.”
He learned about the power of teams playing basketball.
“I ended up getting elected to my high school hall of fame, and that was my peak,” he said, laughing. “I never played college basketball. But I became a huge fan,” he said. “I’m a minority owner of the Lakeland Magic, the Florida minor league team of the Orlando Magic.”
Speak & Spell detour
Demetriou was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, his school of choice, but his parents wanted him to stay close to home.
“So I ended up going to Tufts [University], which was 30 minutes from where we lived,” he said. “The first year I commuted, and I hated it. I finally convinced my parents to let me live on campus as a sophomore.”
He studied chemical engineering because he excelled in math and analytics.
But after graduating in 1980, his career took an odd detour when he joined Texas Instruments’ consumer electronics division in Lubbock that was developing Speak & Spell.
“They were hiring any kind of engineer they could get their hands on — not just electrical engineers — because they were growing like heck at the time,” Demetriou said.
His job interview had been in Dallas, so he assumed that Lubbock was a suburb of Big D.
“I got in my beat-up Chevrolet and drove for a couple of days,” he recalled. “When I blew through Dallas, I realized my miscalculation. Living in the sandstorms of Lubbock surrounded by cotton farms was a true Texas experience.”
A year later, Exxon (before it became Exxon Mobil) offered him a job in Houston more suited for a chemical engineer. He quickly moved up the energy giant’s ladder, becoming one of its youngest vice presidents. He ended his 16-year tenure there as the head of its European chemical business based in Brussels.
In 2001, a New York-based private equity company bought Noveon, B.F. Goodrich’s chemical business in Cleveland, and hired Demetriou to run it.
“My first-ever board meeting holding court as a CEO was on the morning of 9/11,” Dementriou recalled. “Within minutes, the phones were ringing and the meeting was interrupted. I literally started my first CEO role in the middle of a global disaster.”
Three years later, Noveon was the darling of Wall Street and was preparing to go public when Lubrizol Corp., Berkshire Hathaway’s chemical company, stepped up with an offer that gave equity holders (including Demetriou) a return of three times their money.
That same year, Commonwealth Industries hired Demetriou to take over its struggling aluminum manufacturing company, which became Aleris Corp.
Demetriou’s 11-year tenure at Aleris included a successful round trip in and out of Chapter 11.
Culture forward
In 2015, Jacobs came calling, looking for a CEO who could give the company a financial reboot.
Demetriou’s nearly four decades in senior leadership roles taught him that creating a healthy corporate culture was vital to building a strong company. And Jacobs had some big issues on that front.
Its top brass was starkly homogeneous.
“They looked alike, talked alike, thought alike,” said Demetriou, who was 57 at the time. “It was an engineering culture, not a business culture. We had hundreds of offices around the world competing with each other to get whatever business they could. And everybody was focused on maximizing billable hours.
“We’ve been on a journey to change that whole mindset. If anything, we want to minimize billable hours and maximize output solutions and problem-solving.”
A consulting firm dove deep into Jacobs’ culture and found widespread pay and advancement disparity and an overarching feeling that the company was in a leadership abyss where people didn’t have to answer for mistakes.
“When employees tell you, ‘We don’t see accountability,’ that’s pretty powerful,” Demetriou said.
“We had to become a high-performance culture company. Culture, culture, culture,” he said. “You can have a strategy, but you have to have a culture that aligns with it.”
Single letter
Jacobs had a great reputation but wasn’t a brand. Two years ago, Demetriou hired a branding specialist to fix that.
Its new slogan is: “Challenging today. Reinventing tomorrow.” Its logo is an upward-pointing J.
The New York Stock Exchange added to its branding efforts by awarding Jacobs the single-letter “J” as its trading ticker — a status symbol shared with the likes of Citigroup (C), Ford (F), Kellogg’s (K), AT&T (T), Wayfair (W), Visa (V) and U.S. Steel (X).
“We were relentless in trying to get the letter,” Demetriou said. “Our ticker had been JEC for 30 years — Jacobs Engineering Corp. We used the change to celebrate 30 years of being a public company. We had a board meeting at the New York Stock Exchange and rang the opening bell on Feb. 4, 2020.”
The pandemic paused plans to put Jacobs and its logo atop Harwood Center. That should happen later this year.
Jacobs is trading at about $132 a share, up from about $50 a share in 2017 and about $65 a share when the pandemic reared its ugly head in mid-March 2020.
The market currently thinks the company is worth about $17 billion.
Analysts who follow Jacobs are bullish on the stock with a consensus forecast of $154 a share. Jacobs will announce results for its third fiscal quarter on Aug. 3.
“If you look back to 2016, we’ve more than doubled our operating profit and earnings per share,” Demetriou said. “And we’ve grown our top-line gross revenue from about $11 billion to close to $15 billion.”
Not many companies have a stated mission to identify and weed out modern slavery risks in their operations and supply chains. Nor do they use the pride rainbow stripes as a backdrop to their company logo for all of its messaging during LGBTQ+ Pride Month.
Jacobs does, and Jacobs did.
“It’s not diversity and inclusion for us. It’s inclusion and diversity,” Demetriou said. “Inclusion means everyone, including our white males. It’s something I’ve been very vocal about. As we diversify, we can’t lose the hearts and minds of our non-diverse employees. We just want a place where everyone feels that they can belong.”
Demetriou has set his sights on bringing a younger mindset to the company.
“Everybody wants to be a digital company,” he said. “But if you’re run by a bunch of people from my generation, you’re never going to be a digital company. We’re finding and promoting people up through the ranks to help drive a transformative, digital mindset.”
True believers
Today, Jacobs’ 10-member independent board has three men of color, a Black woman and two white women. Of the four white men, two are expats from Scotland and South Africa.
The Black woman is 53-year-old Georgette Kiser, an operating executive at the Carlyle Group, a multinational private equity firm in Baltimore. Kiser joined Jacobs’ board in 2018 and is its youngest director.
“Steve and I met for lunch one day in D.C. Within 10 minutes, he and I knew that we could work well together,” she said. “Steve is incredible. Inclusion is for real for him. Jacobs’ board is very collaborative. You can say what you want to say. You don’t have to sit back and hide about anything.”
Half of Demetriou’s executive leadership team is female.
Joanne Caruso, 60, had been at Jacobs about three years when Demetriou took over. And while she was a vice president with global responsibilities, she wasn’t part of the inner executive circle.
She is now, serving as executive vice president and chief legal and administrative officer.
“Steve really took a chance on me,” she said. “He finds people not just in the normal places and puts the support systems in place to help them succeed.”
‘Speak up. Speak out.’
Demetriou and his wife, Dana, live in Uptown.
He enjoys his 30-minute walk to work when weather and his travel schedule permit. He’s getting back into that rhythm as Jacobs phases in a hybrid schedule of remote, virtual and on-premise work.
His gig at Jacobs initially paid $10 million in total compensation and rose to about $15 million for 2020. Demetriou, along with his top executives and non-executive board members, took a 10% pandemic cut in basic pay for the third and fourth quarters of last year.
The couple, who’ve been married 13 years, have a blended family of five sons and one daughter, ages 25 to 38 — including a 32-year-old Black son, Reggie King, adopted by Steve when he was 14 in a story that’s a bit like The Blind Side.
Reggie played local AAU basketball with Steve’s two sons when they lived in Chicago and was always hanging around the house.
“I found out that he was a foster child with a really rough family upbringing,” Demetriou said. “We all decided that Reggie had to be part of our family.
“It always chokes me up when I talk about him. He’s an amazing young man. He lives in Orlando and works in venture capital.”
After the murder of George Floyd, Demetriou sent out a companywide message where he spoke powerfully about having to give Reggie “the talk.”
“The disturbing incidents across the U.S. over the past couple of months shamefully prove that ‘the talk’ is still required for parents of Black children,” he wrote. “These awful events are deeply impacting our people, and most significantly our Black employees. They also challenge the fabric of the society in which we all live and work — and I feel compelled to speak up and speak out.”
He urged his employees to do the same.
Dallas attorney Rob Walters chairs the Dallas Citizens Council and is vice chair of Klyde Warren Park’s board. Demetriou serves on the council board and was the catalyst behind Jacobs’ $8 million gift last year to help extend Klyde Warren Park.
“The moment Steve came to Dallas, it became a real priority for him and the company that they be a credible, prominent and contributing member of Dallas’ civic life,” said Walters, partner-in-charge of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Dallas office. “Steve is about as compelling of a business leader as I’ve ever encountered.
“He is a true mensch. I continue to marvel at that.”
Steve Tello, senior vice president and general manager of Bally Sports Florida (formerly part of Fox Sports Networks) and one of Demetriou’s closest friends, agrees.
“The way Steve cares about people is genuine, and it makes the man,” Tello said. “He’s not a CEO who is focused on his own world and his own success. This is an incredibly successful, normal guy.
“He’s really transformed that company since he’s taken it over. It’s been exciting to be part of that rocket ride.”
AT A GLANCE: Steve Demetriou
Title: Chair and CEO, Jacobs Inc.
Age: 63
Resides: Uptown
Grew up: Suburban Boston
Education: Bachelor of science in chemical engineering, Tufts University, 1980
Personal: Married to Dana for 13 years. They have a blended family of five sons and one daughter, ages 25 to 38.
Jacobs Engineering Group Inc.
Global headquarters: Harwood Center in downtown Dallas since 2016
Founded: 1947 by Joe Jacobs in Pasadena, Calif., as a one-engineer company
What it does: Provides professional services including consulting, technical, scientific and project delivery for the government and private sector.
Market value: $17 billion
Annual gross revenue: $15 billion
Employees: 55,000 worldwide, including 809 in Dallas-Fort Worth
SOURCES: Steve Demetriou; Jacobs Engineering Group
CORRECTION: An earlier version misstated the number of years since the company was founded as 64 years.
